She said, ‘General O’Day.’
Shoemaker gave us the practical stuff. Chargers for our cell phones, credit cards, a wad of English cash money, hotel reservations, and airplane tickets from Atlanta to London Heathrow, on Delta. The company Gulfstream would fly us down to Georgia, but after that we were strictly commercial, just like regular citizens.
Then we all met in the conference room, because O’Day had two items of late information for us. First up was a photograph. It was a still taken from the security video system at the Gare du Nord railroad station in Paris. It was time-stamped fifty minutes after the shot that killed Khenkin. The focus was off and there was a little blur, but it was clear enough. It showed a guy, average height, wiry, all muscle and sinew. He was turned half away from the camera, lost in a crowd, but his cheekbones gave him away. It was John Kott. His eyes were cast down and his mouth was a tight line. Hard to say from a literal snapshot, but his body language and his facial expression made me feel he was uneasy in the hustle and bustle. Which would be understandable. Fifteen years in Leavenworth, then another in the Arkansas backwoods. The Gare du Nord was one of the busiest railroad terminals in the world. A big change of pace.
O’Day said, ‘That’s the concourse just ahead of the Euro-star tracks. The London train pulled out ten minutes later. We should assume he was on it.’
Casey Nice said, ‘Why isn’t Carson with him?’
O’Day said, ‘We should assume they travelled separately. Much safer that way. They wouldn’t risk both getting nailed, by the same piece of bad luck.’
Then he opened a file and pulled out a bunch of paper. The gang analysis from MI5 in London. He said, ‘They’re sure it’s the local English guys. They own the streets around the target, and they moved in on Karel Libor’s operations very fast. Too fast for the news of Mr Libor’s demise to have reached them through conventional channels. They knew it was going to happen beforehand. Because they set it up.’
He read out a list of four names, a top boy and three trusted lieutenants, White, Miller, Thompson, and Green, like a law firm, and then he described an inner circle of thirty more, supplemented when and where necessary by contract labour anxious to prove its worth. He said collectively they were known as the Romford Boys, and always had been, because they were based in a place called Romford, which was on the eastern edge of the city, north of the river, just inside the orbital highway. He said they were largely white and largely native born. He described their business activities, which were drugs, girls, and guns, the same as Libor’s activities, with protection rackets and loan sharking as the icing on the cake. He had no lurid tales to tell us, of gruesome murders and horrific punishments and sadistic tortures. He said over the years their many and various victims had simply disappeared into thin air, and were never seen again.
Casey Nice went to pack, and I showered again and dressed again and put my toothbrush in my pocket. We met in the Gulfstream’s cabin. She was wearing her Arkansas outfit. She said, ‘General O’Day told me you’re dubious about all of this.’
I said nothing.
She said, ‘Working with me, I mean.’
I said nothing.
She said, ‘What happened to Dominique Kohl was not your fault.’
‘O’Day showed you the file?’
‘I had already read it, on Kott’s bedroom wall. It wasn’t your fault. You couldn’t have known.’
I said nothing.
She said, ‘I’m not going to arrest anyone. I’m going to hang way back. It’s not going to happen again.’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘These things are generally the exception, not the rule.’
‘It could be over before we get there. The Brits must be busting a gut.’
‘I’m sure they are.’
‘We’ll have all their data a minute after O’Day gets it. We’ll be OK.’
‘Now you sound dubious.’
‘I’m not quite sure what to expect.’
I said, ‘Neither am I. No one ever is. On either side. Which is a good thing. It means the game goes to the fastest thinker. That’s all you need to be.’
‘We can’t both be the fastest.’
‘I agree,’ I said again. ‘I might slip into second place. In which case someone is going to start shooting at me with a rifle. So you better stay seven feet away.’
‘Suppose I’m in second place and they start shooting at me?’
‘Same thing. Seven feet away. At least I’ll get a sporting chance.’
The Atlanta airport was so big we had to catch a cab from the General Aviation offices to the passenger terminals. Casey Nice checked in at a thing that looked like an ATM, but I went to the desk instead, where a glance at my new passport got me a boarding pass made of old-fashioned pasteboard. We were in premium coach, which struck me as an oxymoron. Nice said it meant extra leg room. She explained a long and complicated algorithm by which the government saved taxpayer money. Everyone started out in regular coach, unless and until there were compelling reasons why not. The only box we checked was that we were expected to start work immediately after disembarkation. Which got us the leg room.
Which turned out to be not very much. We went through security, shoeless and coatless and with empty pockets, and then we wandered through what looked like a shopping mall to the gate area, via a coffee cart for me and a juice bar for her. She had a small suitcase with wheels, and a thing about halfway between a handbag and a shopping bag. She fit in better than I did, as a regular citizen. We sat on thinly padded chairs and waited, and then eventually we got on the plane, after the rows with the regular leg room had all filled up first. Our seats were the usual kind of thing, and the extra space in front of them was clearly going to work for her, but not for me. If I jammed the bony structure in the small of my back hard against the seat, then I could bend my knees a little more than ninety degrees, but that was about as good as it got.
The pilot said the flight time was going to be six hours and forty minutes.
Two hours later we had eaten and drunk, and the cabin staff turned up the heat so we would all fall asleep and leave them alone. Coshing, I had heard them call it, in conversations among themselves. But it was fine with me. I had slept in worse positions. My headrest had little wings that moved, so I clamped my head like I was wearing a medical device, and I closed my eyes.
Casey Nice said, ‘I take the pills because I get anxious.’
I opened my eyes.
I said, ‘Do they work?’
‘Yes, they do.’
‘How many do you have left?’
‘Five.’
‘You had seven last night, at dinner.’
‘You counted?’
‘Not really. I noticed, is all. It’s a description. They were yellow, they were small, they were in your pocket, there were seven of them.’
‘I took one last night and one this morning.’
‘Because you were anxious?’
‘Yes.’
‘What were you anxious about?’
‘Mastering the brief, and executing the mission.’
‘Are you anxious now?’
‘No.’
‘Because of this morning’s pill?’
‘It already wore off. But I feel OK.’
‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Because this is the easy part.’
‘I know.’
‘Doesn’t Tony Moon’s doctor worry about him never getting better?’
‘People take these things for years. All their lives, some of them.’
‘Is that what you’re going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What else makes you anxious?’
She didn’t answer at first. Then she said, ‘The stakes, I guess. Just the stakes. They’re so high. We can’t let it happen again.’
‘Can’t let what happen again?’
‘September eleventh.’
‘How old were you, anyway?’
‘Formative years.’